If classical planners are ever to automatically plan the actions of the smart machines, particularly robots for the automatic assembly of industrial objects, then they will have to know much more about geometry and topology as well as sensing. Consider that the simple act of changing an object’s grasp-the change might be necessitated by the nature of some assembly goal-involves the interaction ...

In this work, motivated by recent manufacturing trends, we investigate autonomous robotic assembly. Industrial assembly tasks require contact-rich manipulation skills, which are challenging to acquire using classical control and motion planning approaches. Consequently, robot controllers for assembly domains are presently engineered to solve a particular task, and cannot easily handle variation...

In previous chapter it has been described the overall architecture for multimodal learning in the robotic assembly domain (Lopez-Juarez & Rios Cabrera, 2006). The acquisition of assembly skills by robots is greatly supported by the effective use of contact force sensing and object recognition. In this chapter we will describe the robot’s ability to invariantly recognise assembly parts at differ...

A new method for a simplification of a teaching in robotic assembly is presented. Generally, an assembly task is a process that a constraint condition between two workpieces changes. There are many researches for teaching an assembly task to a robot system by a modelbased approach. However, it takes a lot of time to revise information of models that depends on a task environment when every new ...

In this paper an adaptive multiagent robotic assembly system is presented. State of the art industrial equipment is utilized to perform various assembly tasks in a highly unstructured environment without the need for central control. The emphasis is given to the developed methods that address particular issues in such robotic assembly systems. Close collaboration and intertwined work with human...

The fundamental difference between autonomous robotic assembly and traditional hard automation, currently utilized in large-scale manufacturing production, lies in the specific approaches used in locating, acquiring, manipulating, aligning, and assembling parts. An autonomous robotic assembly manipulator offers high flexibility and high capability to deal with the inherent system uncertainties,...

This paper describes the development of a robotic assembly system for the assembly of consumer products in the food and personal care industry. Most commercially available manipulators are equipped with PID motion controllers which are suited for pick-and-place operations. Here we considered assembly of products under conditions of geometric deviations, a task for which PID controllers are less...

Construction and assembly are complex and arduous tasks, especially when performed in hazardous environments such as in orbit, on the Moon, or on Mars. Effective assembly of structures in such environments, where human labor is expensive and scarce, can be facilitated by the use of heterogeneous robotic teams. Over the past five years, we have developed the architectural framework and tools to ...

As the construction process moves towards an increasingly automated scenario, the design of fixing systems which can be easily handed by robotic devices becomes an essential factor in the eventual viability of the whole system. This project has studied many common and many uncommon fixing methods, in a survey covering all areas of engineering industry. Some of the methods are already in use in ...